We needed courage. We got cowardice.

My thoughts on billionaires who own newspapers and betray the public interest

I’ve worked at two newspapers owned by billionaires. Warren Buffett owned The Buffalo News, my hometown daily where I began as a summer intern in 1980 and became the paper’s first woman editor in chief in 1999. To his credit, Buffett never interfered in the editorial policy of the paper; he certainly never killed an editorial, as billionaire owners did this week at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

Katharine Graham, the great Washington Post publisher, showed grace under pressure during the Watergate era and beyond / Getty Images.

But Buffett did betray us eventually, by selling The News to a chain owner, Lee Enterprises, a few years ago. The News had served him well for decades; it had more than 30 percent profit margins for many years, and effectively sent a million dollars a week to Omaha. The paper also did important journalism during Buffett’s ownership, winning two Pulitzer Prizes and saving untold numbers of lives with its reform-minded reporting on the commercial airline industry; that investigative journalism, bolstered by a strong push in editorials, was prompted by a 2009 plane crash in Western New York that killed 50 people. Since then, Lee has pretty much wrecked a community treasure by — for example — moving its printing to Cleveland.

As of this month, after yet another round of staff cuts, the 200-journalist newsroom I directed for more than 12 years is down to about 45. This is tragic and unnecessary.

Jeff Bezos owned the Washington Post the whole time I was the media columnist there from 2016 to 2022, and I thought he was a pretty good owner. Marty Baron, a strong journalist with a stiff spine, was the top editor, and Bezos stayed out of the prize-winning editorial functions of the paper. Baron retired in 2021.

Bezos — who moved to Washington in 2016 — has become more intrusive. He made an ill-considered hire for publisher last year in Will Lewis, a freewheeling Brit who is a veteran of various Murdoch publications. This week, Bezos (through Lewis and their editorial page editor David Shipley) killed off a planned editorial endorsing Kamala Harris.

I’ve written a column about that decision and about a similar move driven by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the Los Angeles Times in 2018. I called these two decisions “an appalling display of cowardice and a dereliction of public duty.” I also quoted Jelani Cobb, Columbia Journalism School dean, who charged that the refusal to endorse in this extraordinarily consequential election “tacitly equalizes two wildly distinct candidates, one of whom has tried to overturn a presidential election and one of whom has not.”

And here’s a powerful statement from a group of columnists at the Washington Post — people I really admire, including Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus, Perry Bacon, Catherine Rampell and quite a few others. At the heart of it is the knowledge of what the Post stood for since the Watergate era when — under the great publisher Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee — the paper bravely revealed the corruption of the Nixon administration and had a hand in bringing him down.

Trump is much worse than Nixon. But the paper is no longer a beacon for democracy.

They called the decision not to endorse “a terrible mistake,” and wrote that it represents “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love.”

They went on: “This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and that threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020. There is no contradiction between The Post’s important role as an independent newspaper and its practice of making political endorsements, both as a matter of guidance to readers and as a statement of core beliefs.”

The Washington Post in a braver era / Getty Images

When Soon-Shiong bought the Los Angeles Times and when Bezos bought the Post, these moves were heralded as public-spirited efforts to help save journalism in a troubled financial era for newspapers. And there’s no doubt that both papers have done plenty of great work since then. But with their core values so callously betrayed — whether out of the owners’ fear of intimidation or financial self-interest or both — an indelible stain remains, just as it does at billionaire Elon Musk’s execrable dismantlement of Twitter.

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Billionaires, pretty clearly, are not going to save us. Quite the opposite.

What should the response be? There’s only one available at the moment. Caring citizens and all defenders of democracy need to do everything in their power to vote Trump out, and begin the long road toward reform of a broken nation.

And to keep in mind the historian Timothy Snyder’s first rule of opposing tyranny: Do not obey in advance. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individual think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

Subscribers, thank you for your support and involvement. Thanks for pointing out examples of admirable journalism you are seeing, and that which fails to meet the moment. You are deeply appreciated. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below or on social media.